Signals are used in many applications such as in communication systems and radar systems. In certain applications, the signals may include pulses with durations as short as a few nanoseconds to as long as several hundred microseconds. The pulses may have a wide variety of modulations such as amplitude or phase modulation.
Pulse processors include a pulse detector and a pulse characterizer. The pulse detector detects the presence of a pulse in the signal and estimates both the time interval and the frequency interval in which the pulse resides. Once a pulse is detected, the signal along with the time interval and the frequency interval of the pulse is passed to the pulse characterizer. The pulse characterizer “snatches” the pulse from its time interval and frequency interval. The pulse characterizer then measures pulse characteristics such as the duration, amplitude, and modulation type.
The pulse detector typically searches over very wide frequency bands and long time records for pulses of a wide variety of modulations under high noise conditions. Due to the wide bandwidths and long time records that are searched, the pulse detector generally dominates the computational load of the pulse processor.
Known pulse processors include high-speed digital processors such as super computers. These pulse processors, however, are typically large and expensive. Other known pulse processors include customized digital processors such as field programmable gate array (FPGA) processors. These pulse processors, however, typically require relatively large amounts of power, especially for the analog-to-digital (A/D) converters required to digitize the incoming signal.